1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to hardware and software based customer premise equipment (CPE) for use in interactive user sessions that involve multimedia. The invention further relates to an automated boot process, and to provisioning and activation technologies for these hardware and software clients.
2. Background Art
Session initiation protocol (SIP) is an existing request/response protocol for initiating, modifying, and terminating interactive user sessions that involve multimedia. SIP-based clients include both hardware and software based customer premise equipment (CPE). Generally, SIP provides signaling and session setup for Internet protocol (IP) communications involving multimedia.
Traditional provisioning approaches used with SIP clients utilize a pull model for provisioning, in which the client checks for configuration changes periodically or requires to be rebooted to get configuration updates. As a result, updates to the SIP clients are traditionally not real-time updates. In addition, by design, SIP is a peer-to-peer protocol. As a result, traditional SIP applications are not configured to maintain persistence of data in a centralized place to enable the subscriber to have a consistent experience across a variety of platforms and hardware solutions. Also, the traditional back-office system does not support clients behind in-home NAT devices or nomadic clients.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a method and system for booting, provisioning, and activating hardware and software clients that address some of the shortcomings in existing approaches.